Bakery products such as muffins, cupcakes, pound cake and the like are usually baked in a fluted paper shell which is specially treated to withstand baking temperatures and ready release from baking tins or receptacles. While various attempts have been made to provide automatic machinery to dispense such paper shells, such attempts have been only marginally successful. It will be understood that to automate the dispensing of such shells, liners or cup-like members is particularly difficult since a nested stack of several hundred such members, each fluted cup nested within the next adjacent, tends to be tightly and frictionally bound. Furthermore, when a cup is extracted from the stack, the next adjacent cup or cups usually are dislodged due to such frictional engagement and more than one such cup will be dispensed.
As mentioned, attempts to automate the dispensing process have been made, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,540,621 illustrates such an attempt; however, this equipment will not consistently dispense only one cup, shell or member at a time, over long periods of time.
There is a vital and universal need for reliable automatic cup dispensing equipment in the baking industry. In addition to factory use by baking companies, inexpensive, reliable equipment of this type is also needed in nearly every bakery. The unfortunate fact is that such paper shells are at the present time dispensed manually in factories and in bakeries alike. The present invention provides simple, foolproof and reliable automated equipment which solves this problem.